For Gloria Steinem, a renowned feminist activist, organizer, reporter and author, Smith College wasn’t just a school — it was “an enormous refuge.”
“It was the first time that I felt free,” she said in a 2007 oral history.
Steinem’s alma mater gave her mental and physical distance from childhood years spent taking care of her mentally ill mother in Ohio, and it gave her the material security to build a life that would one day make her a household name.
“I loved college from the moment I got there,” she wrote in the 1964 Glamour essay “College and What I Learned There.” “Like [movie character] Robert E. Lee Prewitt in the army, I had found a home.”
Steinem, who died on Sept. 2 at 92, had a global footprint, but her legacy began, in many ways, right here in the Pioneer Valley.
Steinem lived in Laura Scales House and majored in government. “She loved coming to a place where she could read as much as she wanted, and there were three meals a day provided for her, and she had a clean, safe place to go to every night,” said Smith College psychology professor Lauren Duncan, author of the upcoming book “Gloria Steinem: The Unlikely Development of an American Feminist Icon.” Steinem graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1956.
She had a long list of other accomplishments and accolades throughout her career. She co-founded Ms. magazine as well as a number of organizations and groups that focused on women’s liberation, including the Ms. Foundation for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Voters for Choice, the Women’s Media Center and the Women’s Action Alliance.
She worked as a reporter for outlets like Glamour, Vogue, Esquire, and New York Magazine. One of her most famous pieces of writing was the 1963 essay “A Bunny’s Tale,” where she went undercover as a Playboy Bunny. She advocated for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and for reproductive rights, among other issues.
She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993, and President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
“I can’t imagine a life better lived,” Duncan said.
Smith provided an early foundation for her activism, Duncan said, in that it allowed her to question authority, as some of her fellow students did when they discussed concerns about the “double reporting” rule, an aspect of the college’s academic integrity policies, in a 1954 house meeting.
“It was so clear that the students felt really comfortable questioning the administration, even in the 1950s, where women — “girls” — were not supposed to be doing that. She learned, in a way, that that was OK to do,” Duncan said.
Steinem continued to stay connected to the college in various ways long after she graduated; she served on the college’s board of trustees and spoke at commencements and other events.
“She came back remarkably frequently, and she was always very generous,” Duncan said. “If you ever asked her to come visit a class, she would do it. She was always very … open to talking to the current students [and] loved it more than anything in the world.”
Carrie Baker, a contributing editor at Ms. and a professor at Smith, first saw Steinem speak at Smith almost two decades ago. Steinem gave a lecture about the influence of Native American women on colonial feminists, and Steinem’s choice of topic “made such an impression on me,” Baker said.
“I wasn’t unfamiliar with that idea, but I loved that that’s what she was talking about at Smith to young women, that that was what she was prioritizing … that these colonial women looked across the way and saw that Indigenous women were not living under the strictures and restrictions of this system we inherited from England and realized that they could live differently,” she said.
Steinem was passionate about intersectionality; women she collaborated with, in various capacities, included Bella Abzug, Rita Mae Brown, Andrea Dworkin, Dolores Huerta, Alice Walker, Marlo Thomas, Florynce Kennedy, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rep. Shirley Chisholm and Loretta Ross, among others. One of the most iconic photos of Steinem features her raising her fist alongside activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a fellow cofounder of the Women’s Action Alliance.
Steinem spent two years in India on a fellowship after she graduated from Smith. It, too, gave her activism an early start, in part because coming home from a country where “there’s every gorgeous skin color in the world there all the time,” she said in the 2007 oral history, made her realize how starkly segregated the U.S. was.
“As I kept saying, ‘You could go snow-blind here.’ I got mad on my behalf. How dare people tell me who my friends can be and where I can live and what I can do? So I think that helps a lot, so that it’s not about giving to somebody or feeling guilty. You get radicalized on your own behalf. Who are they to tell me?” she said.
“Forging coalitions was one of her greatest legacies,” Smith professor and author Susan Faludi wrote in an email. “She was a brilliant bridge builder, reaching across lines of race, class, generations, even sex. It is a tragedy that we have lost her unifying presence at a moment when our politics and culture are so terribly divided and siloed.”
Baker added, “She was really attentive to all kinds of women and learning from all kinds of women — different races, different classes, different sexualities. And I think that made her a really broad thinker and a humanist. Not just a feminist, but a humanist who really thought about people as full people and [about] equality and human rights in a really broad way.”
Steinem donated many of her papers — more than 350 boxes — to Smith between 1984 and 2016, where they are now part of the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History.
“We just have a gold mine, and it’s all due to Gloria Steinem,” Baker said.
The college awarded her the Smith Medal, its highest award for alumnae, in 2017. In 2022, it also named the Special Collections Reading Room after her and established an endowed chair position in her name.
“Students were always so excited when she came. And I was always amazed that they always knew who she was. … Even when students would get sort of cynical about quote-unquote ‘second-wave feminists,’ they were always so excited for Gloria,” Baker said.
Baker recalled a student who dressed up as Steinem for Halloween two years ago, “with the big glasses and the big belt and the bell bottoms, and it was so adorable,” she said. She sent Steinem a photo of the outfit — and Steinem loved it.
“She was always so funny and so relatable and so kind, but brilliant. She always seemed to know what to say to reach people, no matter who they were … She just had a way about her,” Baker said.
Smith lowered the flag atop College Hall to honor Steinem’s memory on Friday, Sept. 4.
“For the College, Gloria was more than an iconic historical figure; she was a steadfast friend, a generous mentor, and an embodiment of Smith’s mission: educating women changes the world,” Smith College President Sarah Willie-LeBreton wrote in a statement.
“Throughout her life, Gloria returned to Smith’s campus to walk our pathways, speak with our students, and remind each generation that the work of justice is ongoing and demands both courage and joyful radical empathy,” Willie-LeBreton continued. “Gloria’s belief in the power of a Smith education was constant, and her legacy serves as a bridge between our storied past and the bold futures our students build.”
Duncan summed it up more simply: “Smith is gonna miss her.”
